"Backporting" is the process of making new software run on something old. A version of something new that's been modified to run on something old is called a "backport".

The Backports Project develops tools to automate the backporting process for Linux drivers. These tools form the backports suite.

History

The Backports Project started in 2007 as compat-wireless. It was renamed to compat-drivers as the project's scope broadened beyond just wireless network drivers. Nowadays, the project is known simply as backports.

As of the 3.10-based release, over 830 device drivers had been backported.

Recent versions of backports support mainline kernels back to version 3.0. The older backports-3.14 supports all kernel versions back to version 2.6.26.